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Schmitt hits the fan in a judicial hearing, as senator Eric Schmitt embarrasses himself with a flawed accusation against Jack Smith. I'll be using their first names since last names are so similar.
First as a small recap, Senator Eric was trying to prove that Jack had secretly traveled to Atlanta to conspire with local prosecutor Fani Willis, who was pursuing criminal charges against Trump for the attempted overturn of the 2020 elections. He asked Jack if Jack had been to Atlanta, and when Jack denied it, Eric accused Jack of perjury. It was made into a big show with them even making a giant poster for the media pointing to text messages showing Jack had watched a joke game in Atlanta between the Hawks and the Golden State Warriors only for things to immediately fall flat when it turns out Jack was actually in Maryland attending a WNBA game Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa Hawkeyes. This has been confirmed with both video evidence of Jack Smith at the Maryland game, and analysis of the stadiums (the specific seats they had mentioned do not exist in the Atlanta Hawks stadiums). Barring a clone, Jack Smith was not in Atlanta that day.
Eric Schmitt had the rollout planned with conservative influencers such as Benny Johnson and Sean Hannity, who have since deleted their tweets celebrating his callout in the hearings. Eric and his associates also seemed to have a planned article in Axios to come out afterwards as a potential 2028 VP pick. Basically, he went all in on making this his moment to shine, and he flopped.
Of course as per modern politics, there is no apology for the false accusation. As Hanania puts it
And as Johnathan Chait jokes, there's a funny nominative determinism to be seen here
I think some of the reaction is overly harsh, but there's also no denying that the reaction to his mixup among the right has been weird. Eric Schmitt was actively being praised on the Charlie Kirk show right after!
But as the community note points out, and as Eric Schmitt was already aware of at the time the text messages did not (and could not) confirm Jack Smit was going to a Hawk's game because Jack was not at the Hawks game to begin with. Of course he's dumbfounded by the claim, he literally was not there.
But time to get started on the overall point here. Schmitt claims his job is to "ask questions" but that's clearly not what he was actually doing. Schmitt wanted to put on a show and advance his political career, not to engage in fact finding. If he was just asking questions, why did he have all the theatrics planned afterwards? Why did he so readily accuse perjury? Why won't he apologize now for the false accusation? And why break protocol like this? It would have saved him from embarrassment if he went through the normal process
Congressional hearings are political theater, they don't serve for fact finding anymore. And why is this? Because they're public. They're on camera, so politicians put on a show. Like reason writer Binion says
The more directly public that politics has gotten, the more it's become a trashy reality TV show, exemplified of course by the trashy reality TV show host president. I live in a pretty red district and one thing I've definitely noticed with many around me is that their political interest is one of entertainment. It's why I'm one of the few people who can even name our governor (Josh Stein) yet alone the local mayor. Local politics are boring, too much sausage making and not enough fun despite having far more direct impact into our life. Eric Schmitt's failure here might be funny, but it's also just another sign of the degeneration of politics in the modern social media era and I don't think that's going away anytime soon. Nate Silver might think this is one of the greatest self owns in the history of the Senate but I say, it's one of the greatest so far. Just wait and see.
Imagine falsely accusing someone and then not apologising for it! You're right, that would be embarrassing.
I'm sure you personally didn't do exactly the same thing to me lower down in the thread, where you mistook me for another commenter and threw a bunch of accusations at me:
Then, when I pointed out that I hadn't said any of the things you were accusing me of, what was your response?
Nice apology after accusing a person of throwing a tantrum based on your lack of reading comprehension.
The absolute chutzpah to accuse your political opponents of beclowning themselves with false accusations, and then not apologising for those false accusations, a couple of hours after doing the exact thing yourself. Truly incredible.
Too much heat. You've actually eaten a previous ban for letting this user get to you before, and this response is moddable on its own. Relitigating grudges in every thread does not make for quality discussion.
I'm making it a two day ban this time, in hopes that you get the idea.
I argued against this sort of ban when it was applied to someone calling out Dean, and I will argue against it here as well. I don't think prohibiting this kind of response is actually improving discussion quality. There are few things as infuriating as hypocrisy, where people seek to reap the discourse benefits of having principles when it is convenient, but refuse to pay the tax of being bound by them. The "heat" was already introduced when OP decided to be a hypocrite; stopping people from venting it will not let you cheat the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but just make them bottle it up and release it gradually over the course of future interactions with him (amplified by the additional anger over him getting away with the initial offense thanks to jannie cover). Presumably, this will result in OP feeling treated unfairly/diffusely persecuted by the community, which will in turn encourage him to needle his opposition more.
I tend to think that paying enough attention to people's usernames to stay mad at them for stuff they said in other threads is the wrong way to use this website.
We're not running for President here, people should be able to change their minds or try out new opinions without getting grilled on their previous record. And as someone who mostly lurks, I find that posts that attack a specific user rather than their argument are usually not very interesting to read.
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I'm not sure if this is what you are referring to as "the initial offense," but magicalkittycat was banned for it. What is "jannie cover?"
It's not strictly that call-outs that are banned, I would say, so much as heated ones. Posters who are aggravatingly hypocritical can certainly have that spelled out, but it still has to be within the context of a rule-abiding post--more light than heat, ample charity, etc. We do actually mod people when it seems like they are baiting others deliberately, but that doesn't mean we're going to refrain from moderating people who snap at the bait. As always, bad behavior is not excusable by other people's bad behavior.
It looks like he was banned for attacking @stoatherd, but the offense I am talking about is in the opening post of this thread (invoking a principle (apologise for false accusations that you make) that you provably do not consider to apply to yourself). "Jannie cover" is moderators banning people for calling this out.
I think you could analyse all that transpired in this thread as an extension of an initial offense (magicalkittycat's (mistargeted?) attack on stoatherd), but in that case, looking at the sequencing of posts, this reveals a more general structural problem with moderation. As far as I can tell, the chronology was:
magicalkittycat attacks stoatherd, seemingly based on a mixup of usernames, and they have the exchange in the thread you linked where the mixup comes out but magicalkittycat does not apologise
magicalkittycat makes a new top-level post attacking some outgroup senator for not apologising after making a false accusation
stoatherd calls him out on this
you ban stoatherd for his callout
I see that snapshot of the situation and start writing my response
you go back to the above thread and ban magicalkittycat for the original attack
I post my response to your ban of stoatherd
Between the beginning and the end of the chain, almost a whole day had passed. Not only is this a whole day in which the situation was allowed to fester in ambiguity (with plenty of opportunity for readers to build the expectation that this is yet another of the numerous cases where the moderators will not punish someone who manifestly deserved punishment), but the order in which you then proceeded to respond to the situation (punish the downstream reactions first, and only then move up the chain) created a window in which the above expectation would be confirmed (initial act unpunished, reactions cracked down on).
Moreover, due to how slow the response was, by the time the punishment for magicalkittycat's original post was dispensed, the community's attention window has long moved on, and hardly anyone will even see that ban. Therefore, it neither conveys deterrence to others who might commit a similar offense, nor a sense that justice was served to those who were offended by it (unless they were so obsessed as to save magicalkittycat's original post and make a note to come back to it the next day). The bottom line is broken window upon broken window was lined up and left a large number of readers with the diffuse sense that moderation is unfair.
Concrete suggestions to improve this situation (any subset of them would be an improvement):
when untangling heated situations where you are going to punish multiple people who attacked each other, moderate in chronological order
if a post was reported but the mod response is delayed because of internal discussion or nobody having time, have some way to flag "we received reports and are currently deciding how to proceed" to distinguish this state from "we consider this post good and won't do anything about it"
if moderation was slow to respond, consider the delay a mitigating circumstance for "vigilante justice" posts that offended back against the initial offender
link to related moderator action, so it doesn't wrongly appear one-sided if one side's punishment is prominent while the other's is buried (i.e. your modhat post against stoatherd should have linked to the modhat post against magicalkittycat)
Thanks for the suggestions, none seem unreasonable. In case it helps you understand anything you don't already understand, here are some of the thoughts I had while reading them.
I did not actually set out to "untangle" anything. The mod queue is chronological, and the posts at the top are the newest, while older posts spill onto other pages. So when I go into the mod queue, I see the newest complaints first. Sometimes I go down to the bottom and work my way up, but most of the time I do not do that, instead moderating from the top down, because that is the most natural way to navigate the queue. Design flaw? Maybe!
We do actually do this when there is internal discussion going on. But most of the time, mod response is slow because there's just no one watching the queue. The only really plausible solution to this would be professional moderators. Sadly, every single one of us has other things to do.
We actually not only encourage community policing, but sometimes make positive mod notes on the accounts of users who do it properly. But "vigilante justice" is not the proper way to do it. There are ways to suggest that others are abusing the rules without breaking the rules yourself. It does seem like most people would rather do it the "mob justice" way than the "patient patrician" way! But in general I think the foundation calls for the latter and forbids the former.
This makes more sense to me if I'm trying to "untangle" things, but in most cases that's some combination of difficult, annoying, and pointless. The more effort we have to put into moderation, sadly, the less happy we are to do it! It's much more straightforward to moderate on a case-by-case basis, and when people start into "but he said--" we can just drop "your bad behavior is not excused by the bad behavior of others."
This is also why serial boundary testers are such a heavy drain on the community. You tell someone to "fuck off," we ban you. Easy peasy! But if you carefully write a rule-abiding post where the subtext is "fuck off," probably we won't ban you, at least not the first time. The problem is that when we do eventually decide that, yes, on balance, this poster is up to no good and the community needs a break from their shenanigans, we have to knit together a post linking to multiple semi-infractions and explaining that, no, generally we're not going to ban this level of fisticuffs, but the user has become egregiously obnoxious and therefore...
Well, hopefully you get the idea. You're right: the mod team could probably do better. Hopefully no one is surprised to hear that! But the level of effort it would take to deliver on these suggestions is, I suggest, extremely unlikely to manifest, at least in most cases. It's not a question of approach, it's a question of resources--specifically, time and attention.
This is the part where you accept a bunch of NEET/retired moderators and then they ruin the site.
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With links and timestamps (in my time zone, EDT):
2026-10-01 11:04: Magicalkittycat attacks Stoatherd, seemingly based on a mixup of usernames, and they have the exchange in the thread you linked where the mixup comes out but Magicalkittycat does not apologise
2026-10-01 17:47: Magicalkittycat makes a new top-level post attacking some outgroup senator for not apologising after making a false accusation
2026-10-01 22:48: Stoatherd calls him out on this
2026-10-02 07:29: You ban Stoatherd for his callout [8:41 after Stoatherd's comment]
Indeterminate: 4bpp sees that snapshot of the situation and starts writing his response
2026-10-02 07:45: You go back to the above thread and ban Magicalkittycat for the original attack [20:41 after Magicalkittycat's comment]
2026-10-02 08:01: 4bpp posts his response to your ban of Stoatherd
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Damn you are so right, a sitting senator falsely accusing someone of a crime at a public hearing is on the same exact level as a random mixup between two people with very similar usernames on an online website.
A sitting senator falsely accusing someone may be a bigger deal, but so is a sitting senator publicly admitting wrongdoing and apologising. Either way, the bottom line is that no amount of sophistry can really wash away the bad look of making ethical demands of someone else but showing no desire to be bound by them yourself at whatever smaller scale is applicable to you.
(On the meta level, a teaching moment. Even after conceding that you made a mistake, and even after this callout, you clearly are deeply averse to just saying sorry, even though it would resolve this altercation and improve your reputation considerably. Apologising to adversaries who you disdain and believe have wronged you in countless ways before is psychologically hard.)
Well such apologies improve one's reputation in some circles but not necessarily in others. I would guess that among ultra partisan progressive types, it would diminish one's standing to publicly make that kind of concession to the out-group. Probably few, if any, ultra partisan progressive types read this message board but all of our minds are haunted by the ghosts of tribesmen from the ancestral environment.
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